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The core purpose of Benjamin Bloom's, "Taxonomy of Educational Objectives, Handbook 1: Cognitive Domain" was to provide a classification system for educational goals and student behaviors, aiding in communication, curriculum development, and evaluation.
There was never a list of instructional strategies identified for each level of thinking. However, by understanding the intended student behaviors described at each level of the taxonomy and examining the illustrative objectives and test items that assess these behaviors, you can infer or deduce potential instructional approaches that would encourage students to develop these cognitive skills.
This resource provides a list of definitions and inferred instructional approaches for each of Bloom's Taxonomy levels.
Knowledge
This level emphasizes the remembering, recall, or recognition of ideas, material, or phenomena, largely as they were originally encountered. It covers specifics like terminology and facts, as well as more abstract forms such as conventions, trends, classifications, criteria, methodologies, principles, generalizations, theories, and structures.
Direct Instruction and Presentation: Teachers can lecture, present facts, definitions, rules, and theories directly to students.
Rote Learning and Repetition: Encourage activities that promote memorization and recall, such as drills, flashcards, and repetition of information, recognizing that knowledge acquisition can involve rote recall.
Information Recall Tasks: Utilize quizzes, questions requiring students to list, identify, or match terms, dates, events, or principles.
Content Exposure: Assign readings and provide materials that expose students to the specific knowledge intended for acquisition.
Comprehension
This level signifies the lowest level of understanding, where students can grasp what is being communicated and make some use of the material or idea without necessarily relating it to other material or seeing its fullest implications. It includes translation, interpretation, and extrapolation.
Translation:
Paraphrasing and Restating: Ask students to explain concepts in their own words, translating technical or abstract phraseology into simpler terms.
Conversion Between Forms: Have students convert information from one form to another, such as verbal descriptions to diagrams, graphs, or mathematical symbols, and vice versa.
Illustrating Concepts: Ask students to provide concrete examples or illustrations for abstract principles or non-literal statements (e.g., metaphors).
Interpretation:
Summarizing and Outlining: Guide students to identify and summarize major ideas within a communication, recognizing their interrelationships and distinguishing essentials from non-essentials.
Data Analysis (Drawing Inferences): Present students with graphs, tables, or complex texts and have them draw conclusions or make inferences based solely on the provided data, judging the validity of these conclusions.
Comparing and Contrasting: Ask students to compare and contrast different viewpoints or elements within a text.
Extrapolation:
Predicting Trends: Have students extend trends or tendencies beyond given data to predict implications, consequences, or effects, while recognizing the probabilistic nature of such predictions.
Filling Gaps: Ask students to interpolate missing data points or events within a sequence based on established trends.
Scenario-based Predictions: Present a scenario and ask students to estimate consequences of actions described.
Application
This level involves the use of abstractions (general ideas, rules, principles, methods, theories) in particular and concrete new situations, without explicit prompting as to which abstraction to use.
Problem-Solving Exercises: Provide students with new, unfamiliar problems or situations and require them to select and apply appropriate principles, rules, or methods to find solutions.
Case Studies: Engage students in analyzing real-world or fictionalized case studies (e.g., social problems, economic policies) and proposing solutions by applying relevant generalizations.
Simulations and Experiments: Design activities where students must perform procedures or conduct experiments that require them to apply scientific or technical principles in a practical setting.
Practical Tasks/Design Challenges: Assign tasks that involve the practical application of knowledge, such as home repairs based on experimental procedures or predicting effects of changes in a biological system.
Emphasis on "Transfer of Training": Consciously design learning experiences that require students to transfer what they've learned to novel contexts, recognizing that practice in restructuring and classifying situations is key.
Analysis
This level focuses on breaking down a communication into its constituent elements or parts, clarifying the hierarchy of ideas, and making explicit the relationships between ideas and the organizational principles used.
Analysis of Elements:
Identifying Components: Ask students to identify explicit elements such as hypotheses, conclusions, facts, and assumptions within a text or argument.
Unstated Assumptions/Motives: Guide students to infer unstated assumptions, distinguish factual from normative statements, and identify motives or functions of specific statements.
Analysis of Relationships:
Logical Argument Breakdown: Have students analyze the relationships between statements in an argument, distinguishing relevant from irrelevant information, and identifying logical fallacies or inconsistencies.
Causal Relationships: Ask students to distinguish cause-and-effect relationships from other sequential relationships in historical accounts or scientific descriptions.
Idea Interrelationships: Focus on activities that help students comprehend the interrelationships among ideas within a passage.
Analysis of Organizational Principles:
Inferring Author's Intent/Structure: Lead students to infer the author's purpose, point of view, or bias by analyzing the communication's structure and organization.
Examining Techniques: Have students identify the techniques used in persuasive materials (e.g., advertising, propaganda) or the formal elements in artistic works.
Synthesis
Synthesis involves putting together elements and parts to form a new whole, creating a pattern or structure not clearly there before, often demonstrating creative behavior within a framework.
Production of a Unique Communication:
Creative Writing/Composition: Assign tasks requiring students to write original essays, stories, poems, or musical compositions where they organize ideas, feelings, and experiences into a new, coherent form, considering audience and medium.
Extemporaneous Speaking: Encourage activities that develop the ability to construct and deliver impromptu speeches.
Production of a Plan, or Proposed Set of Operations:
Design Challenges: Task students with designing plans, procedures, or solutions to complex problems, such as a drill jig, a chemical process, or a unit of instruction, meeting specified requirements.
Hypothesis Generation and Testing Plans: Guide students to propose ways of testing hypotheses or integrate investigation results into an effective plan to solve a problem.
Derivation of a Set of Abstract Relations:
Formulating Hypotheses/Theories: Challenge students to formulate appropriate hypotheses to explain observed phenomena or to develop abstract relations and conceptual schemes from data or propositions.
Making Discoveries/Generalizations: Encourage activities that lead to mathematical discoveries or generalizations based on analysis of relations.
Fostering Creativity: Provide freedom from excessive tension and rigid viewpoints, allow students to determine their own purposes and materials, and offer sufficient time for exploration and organization.
Evaluation
Evaluation involves making judgments about the value of ideas, works, solutions, methods, or materials for some purpose, based on criteria and standards. It is considered to incorporate all other cognitive behaviors.
Judgments in Terms of Internal Evidence:
Assessing Accuracy and Consistency: Have students critically examine communications (e.g., arguments, reports) to identify logical fallacies, inconsistencies, or internal flaws.
Evaluating Documentation: Teach students to assess the general probability of accuracy in reporting facts based on the care given to exactness of statement and documentation.
Judgments in Terms of External Criteria:
Applying External Standards: Guide students to evaluate materials, works, or ideas against remembered or selected external criteria (e.g., comparing a work to established standards of excellence in its field, judging the appropriateness of means to achieve specific ends).
Weighing Values: Engage students in activities that require them to identify and appraise judgments and values involved in choosing a course of action.
Critical Review: Have students write critical reviews or critiques where they articulate their principles of evaluation and apply them to a given work (e.g., a poem).
Developing Criteria: Encourage students to develop and articulate their own criteria for judging quality or effectiveness in various domains.
Resources
Bloom, B. S. (1956). Taxonomy of. Educational Objectives, 250.
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